In the operation of a commercial laundry, it is necessary to introduce chemicals such as soap and detergent into each of a plurality of washing machines. Although these machines have automatic machinery for introducing the chemical into the wash water at various parts of the washing cycle, it has been necessary in the past to load the chemicals into the automatic machinery by hand. In addition to the obvious disadvantage of this method of operation, due to the high cost of manual labor, there is also a disadvantage in the fact that the washing machines operate on cycles of different length, which means that on occasion a plurality of machines will need to have their automatic machinery loaded at the same time with chemical. Since the attendant can only load one machine at a time, there is a strong possibility that one of the machines will be idle at a given time which, of course, represents a loss because its share of the capital amortization. In addition, a manual loader or attendant will sometimes forget to load chemicals into a given washing machine, so that the machine can pass through an entire wash cycle before it has been discovered that the cleaning agent or the like did not take part in the washing operation. Attempts have been made in the past to provide automatic chemical distribution systems to solve this problem, but they have all been very expensive and they have been easily rendered out of order due to the generally corrosive nature of the chemicals which they handle. They have also suffered from the difficulty that, when the storage hopper becomes empty, there is a gap in the flow of chemicals to the machines until such time as the hopper can be reloaded. These and other difficulties experienced with the prior art devices have been obviated in a novel manner by the present invention.
It is, therefore, an outstanding object of the invention to provide a chemical distribution system for serving chemicals at a predetermined pressure to a plurality of appliances.
Another object of this invention is the provision of a distribution system for providing soap and the like to a plurality of commercial washing machines, so that the automatic feed mechanisms of the machine are full at all times.
A further object of the present invention is the provision of a chemical distribution system for a commercial laundry which can be inexpensively manufactured from readily obtainable materials and standard parts, and which is capable of a long life of useful service with a minimum of maintenance.
With these and other objects in view, as will be apparent to those skilled in the art, the invention resides in the combination of parts set forth in the specification and covered by the claims appended hereto.